LESLIE JAMISON The Recovering: Intoxication and its aftermath. Reviewed by Shelley McInnis
Leslie Jamison illuminates her own downhill slide into alcoholism and eventual uphill lurch into continuous sobriety by a scholarly investigation of the lives and works of numerous alcoholic literary luminaries.
It isn’t often that a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, which has a tradition of public anonymity, comes out of the closet to write her story of, as the subtitle of this book proclaims, intoxication and its aftermath. I might have missed it altogether if it hadn’t been for a recent review by Fiona Wright. Wright appears to have been intrigued by Jamison’s insights into anorexia nervosa and alcoholism: in particular, her characterisation of the former as having to do with self-denial and the latter with abandon. If the award-winning author of Small Acts of Disappearance had been impressed by Jamison’s book, I was certain to be, too.
Jamison is a beautiful dark-haired New Yorker who lectures at Columbia and has a doctorate in American literature from Yale. She has published a novel called The Gin Closet as well as a bestselling collection of essays called The Empathy Exams. Now that I have read The Recovering, I’ve discovered that Jamison wrote and published these two books while she was still in her 20s and wrestling with her addiction to alcohol. She began to write The Recovering when she was four years sober and, finally, on solid ground in her own recovery from alcoholism.
This book could be described, I think, as a ‘biblio-memoir’, where the narrative arc of the author’s story, in this case Jamison’s downhill slide into alcoholism and eventual uphill lurch into continuous sobriety, is illuminated by a scholarly investigation of the lives and works of numerous alcoholic literary luminaries, all of whom believed that addiction was generative, an ‘accessory that spoke of inner depths’. Like Raymond Carver, John Berryman, John Cheever, Charles Jackson, Jean Rhys and David Foster Wallace, Jamison feared that if she stopped drinking, the electricity would go out of her writing. If she couldn’t disabuse herself of this idea, she knew that she risked committing suicide, as had some of those great literary figures. In the first ten pages of The Recovering, therefore, she sets herself a challenge:
If addiction stories run on the fuel of darkness – the hypnotic spiral of an ongoing, deepening crisis – then recovery is often seen as the narrative slack, the dull terrain of wellness, a tedious addendum to the riveting blaze. I wasn’t immune; I’d always been enthralled by stories of wreckage. But I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could.
The good news is that, yes, stories about getting better can be as compelling as stories about falling apart, and this book is a good example. However, it is also fair to say that if you are tempted by this title, it would help to have a keen interest in the psychological processes of addiction and recovery. I do, but even I began to tire after about 371 pages of Jamison’s beautiful but densely written prose, which forced me to re-read many sentences. At one stage, Jamison’s AA sponsor admonishes her for over-complicating things. ‘Keep it simple,’ she says. ‘I hear you, sister,’ I thought. Nevertheless I ploughed on, gripped by all of the recovery drama. Would Leslie pick up a drink while boyfriend Dave was away? Would he get together with Destiny, who was cute and could actually drink without blacking out
For anyone touched by addiction, or working in the field, or even for anyone inspired by a Hollywood movie to learn more about what actually goes on inside AA, The Recovering should be regarded as essential reading. It is all here in this book: the tedium of meetings, the shame of relapsing, the 12 steps, the sponsorship, the irritation of clichés but, also, the unexpected joy of becoming a part of what Jamison calls the ‘basement chorus’. AA meetings are often held in church basements, but Jamison’s phrase is a reference to the fact that recovery involves the loss of alienated self-consciousness, and its replacement by the desire to be of service to others. Her book should be read, therefore, not so much as a work of literary merit, which it certainly is, but mostly as an expression of gratitude to everyone who has helped her to get to the safe place she currently inhabits in the clean bright light of sobriety:
I’ll always associate sobriety with a quality of light that I’ve only ever seen in the broad winter horizons of Iowa: hard, expansive, exposing. It came from huge and frozen skies, their dwarfing blue, and glinted off snow mounds the size of bedrooms. I was nothing but naked in it – a brightness so clean and uncluttered it hurt.
Leslie Jamison The Recovering: Intoxication and its aftermath Granta 2018 HB 544pp $39.99
Shelley McInnis is a Canberra-based book reviewer with over 40 years of personal and professional experience in the arena of alcohol and drug addiction.
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